76% of IFE engagement
time is with movies
(business pax - 82%)
10%is spent
watching TV
THE F UTUR E O F I FEC
“IFE is no longer its own
ecosystem but part of the larger
digital ecosystem of an airline”
Jan-Peter Gänse, head of passenger experience solutions, Lufthansa Systems”
aircraftinteriorsinternational.com
SEPTEMBER 2019 061
W hat kind of technologies will define the
inflight entertainment and connectivity
(IFEC) of the future? The answer in one word
is: “disruptive.”
One of the most important driving forces behind
the evolution of IFEC is the movement toward
increased personalisation of the passenger
experience. Indeed one of the four pillars
which the Airline Passenger Experience
Association’s (APEX) new board of
governors – consisting of five
prominent airline CEOs chaired
by Doug Parker of American
Airlines (recommended to the
APEX board of directors for
2018/2019) was to personalise
the passenger experience.
Among the Personalisation
Best Practices cited by the APEX
Personalisation Task Force –consisting of
Rich Salter of the Salter Group, Jon Norris
of FlightPath 3D, and this writer – are the
use of IFEC systems as “engagement portals,”
pro-actively encouraging their take-up and
the more effective use of data.
“Airlines today have access to more data
points than ever before,” said David Bartlett,
chief technology officer of Panasonic Avionics
Corporation when announcing in April 2019 the
launch of a cloud-based data analytics
programme to be rolled out by Panasonic
in the second half of 2019. “By fully
integrating data analytics across every
aspect of their passenger experience,
airlines will be able to use the information
delivered to optimise their passenger
experience and business performance.”
At the APEX Tech conference on 7-8
May 2019 in LA, Andre Valera of Touch
Inflight Solutions said that curated data
capture and analytics can be used today by
airlines and content service providers to
aid in content selection and licencing
decisions. They can also be used in the
provision of content recommendation and
discovery engines in IFEC systems that
push personalised recommendations to
individual passengers based on personal
and environmental data used with
passenger permissions.
“Today, 75% of Netflix’s viewing
activity is the direct result of content
recommendations that rely on data
analytics,” Valera said. Increasing IFE
THE FUTURE VIEW
In the opinion of this writer, the future of IFEC will look something like this:
• The passenger experience will be increasingly personalised
• IFEC will transition from passive entertainment and communications into curated,
pro-active passenger engagement, with the IFEC interface as the engagement portal
• IFEC will rapidly migrate from hardware-focused to software-focused, with applications,
artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics having major roles
• IFEC will migrate away from separate IFE and connectivity solutions and be supported by
a single digital platform in which the aircraft is a datacentre
• IFEC/passenger engagement will be data-led, with cross-industry data-sharing, and
an aggregate database supporting content selection/licencing, targeted/personalised
advertising, and targeted/personalised ecommerce and travel apps – increasing both
revenue and satisfaction
• IFE will be cloud based, data driven, demand oriented, dynamically delivered, and output
licenced, with the 45 to 60-day content delivery cycle and 30-day exhibition cycle evolving
into daily delivery and demand-based exhibition
• Passenger focus will evolve into customer focus, concentrating on the door-to-door
experience versus the gate-to-gate experience
• The role of Content Service Provider (CSP) will evolve from licencing and delivering
content into managing passenger engagement and responsibility for increasing take-up,
as airlines hold third-party providers to higher standards and consider bringing more
activities in-house
ALL STATISTICS IN
THIS ARTICLE ARE
FROM A SAMPLE DATA
ANALYTICS REPORT FOR
AN UNNAMED AIRLINE,
COURTESY OF TOUCH
INFLIGHT SOLUTIONS
RIGHT: DATA ANALYTICS
ARE BEGINNING TO
PLAY A BIGGER ROLE IN
CONTENT ACQUISITION
AND LICENCING.
IMAGE: TOUCH INFLIGHT
/aircraftinteriorsinternational.com